Warring souls: youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran by Varzi, Roxanne

Gaini, Firouz

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00027_27.x

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…6 'Reformist' is an umbrella term for a political faction within the Islamic Republic that aligns itself with the movement that ushered in the presidency of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and that seeks to reform the political structure of the Islamic Republic (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2019). 7 There is a rich literature on production of media in the post-revolutionary sphere in Iran (see, among others, Devictor 2015;Naficy 2012;Semati 2007;Siamdoust 2017;Varzi 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The perils of producing revolutionary moderation: entertainment, style, and the ‘Islamic Che’ in Iran

Bajoghli

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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What makes revolutionary media ‘moderate’, and why would a revolutionary state produce moderation? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with pro‐regime media producers in Iran, this article examines the attempted creation of a new revolutionary hero, an ‘Islamic Che’, who appeals to younger audiences by creating a moderate style. Iran's regime media makers seek to attract not just youth who protest against the Islamic Republic, but their own children: those they imagined would be their automatic base of support. How do revolutionary states cultivate a base among a new generation willing to defend the existing political structure? This article examines how state media makers imagine ‘moderate style’ as that which can both stay true to the founding principles and be entertaining enough for younger generations. Beyond the example of post‐revolutionary Iran, this article also allows us to think more about the predicament of all states: namely how do they attempt to attract the attention of citizens in a world inundated with easy‐to‐access digital content?

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…77There is a rich literature on production of media in the post‐revolutionary sphere in Iran (see, among others, Devictor 2015; Naficy 2012; Semati 2007; Siamdoust 2017; Varzi 2006). …”

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confidence: 99%

The perils of producing revolutionary moderation: entertainment, style, and the ‘Islamic Che’ in Iran

Bajoghli

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…Images installed in the langar hall both authorize ethico‐political stances in the here and now and memorialize past struggles, bringing different kinds of martyr(dom)s across time and place into emergent dis/similarity. However, postcolonial anxieties occlude the creativity of its repetition (on the creativity of martyrological iconography, see Mittermaier 2015, 586 and Varzi 2006), reducing the memorialization of martyr(dom)s in the Sikh tradition to “optical illusion” (e.g., Das 1992, 247) and “the obsession to mechanically analogize new events to a limited stock of past events” (Das 1992, 253). Post/colonial states have relatedly sought to appropriate the tradition, prizing Sikh men of caste as a loyal race of “special warrior‐martyr[s]” (Fox 1985, 8; see also Fenech 1997; Imy 2019) for their putative, if properly subdued, bravado and valor.…”

Section: Diasporic Imaginaries: the Scaling Of Struggle In Memorial C...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

Hothi

2024

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.

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“…The recent anthropology of Islam has provided a particularly fruitful realm for analysis in this field, with work like Deeb and Harb (2013) among Shi'ites in Lebanon, Simon (2009) in Minangkabau, and Agrama (2010) in Egypt, to name but a few. There is also a small but growing field of work on ethical life in contemporary Iran through the lens of women's piety (Haeri, 2020), the juridical system (Osanloo, 2020), and through kinship and food (Wellman, 2021), while ethical concerns appear perhaps tangentially throughout much of the anthropological materials on Iran from the beginning of the 21st century (Khosravi, 2008(Khosravi, , 2017Mahdavi, 2009;Varzi, 2006) although a work dedicated exclusively to this subject remains absent.…”

Section: Morality and Ethics In Iranmentioning

confidence: 99%

The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran

Theobald

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.

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Warring souls: youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran by Varzi, Roxanne

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The perils of producing revolutionary moderation: entertainment, style, and the ‘Islamic Che’ in Iran

The perils of producing revolutionary moderation: entertainment, style, and the ‘Islamic Che’ in Iran

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran

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